Yuletide reveal! (Reply)

I am not a team player. The thought of team sports makes me break out in hives. In the thirteen years I've been with The Boy, I've managed to remain completely, blissfully, ignorant about the sport around which his family revolves. And yet when thefourthvine suggested this Nike advertisement as a potential Yuletide source earlier in the year, I somehow couldn't resist. POC protagonists! Rivalry! Jealousy! Extreme competence! It's only a minute long, but somehow contains an entire world:

My Yuletide lesson this year was that one-minute fandoms are hard, yo. I couldn't really put my finger on the problem until I read this brilliantly insightful post on narrative tension (highly recommended!!) by supacat aka freece, whom you may know as the author of the utterly absorbing Captive Prince series. I'm so used to having complex, lengthy sources to leverage off as a source of narrative tension, not to mention characters that have distinct personalities. Squashing character development and something of a relationship into 10,000 words was... challenging, to say the least. To make it even more difficult there was also the whole basketball thing, Christ. Despite The Boy's best efforts, I still have no idea what a pick-and-roll actually looks like. On the other hand, I do now have strong opinions on the size of Dwight Howard's head in relation to his shoulders, Blake Griffin's performance at Jenga, whether or not Shane Battier could win Jeopardy!, if Dwyane Wade is the best-dressed man in the NBA, and if Kobe's Death Stare was the final nail in Mike Brown's coffin. -- Oh, and did I mention that this fandom takes place TWENTY YEARS IN THE FUTURE? I mean, sports science fiction, I can't even.

Anyway, given the time constraints of working around a screaming three month old baby, I'm tolerably satisfied with how it turned out. Thank you so much to supacat for her structural superpowers, isilya for sports-fandom cheerleading, kaneko for moral support, and the_grynne for expert advice on future!China. And, of course, to The Boy for endless technical advice, sending me all the best gossip links, and sharing fannish squee with me for the first time ever.